


the natural progression of the color wheel

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Series: interludes and conversations [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Dirty Talk, M/M, Relatively Canon-Compliant, Reunion Fic, in-universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-27
Updated: 2014-08-27
Packaged: 2018-02-15 00:04:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2208078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The incredible thing, the undeniably overwhelming thing, is that when it’s all over, when the haze of trying to catch the man that killed Erskine subsides and the adrenaline boils out of Steve’s system, is that suddenly he notices color.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>or: Steve lives his life in tones of monochrome, until something comes to sharpen his sight into color</p>
            </blockquote>





	the natural progression of the color wheel

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed. I don't even know what the hell I'm doing anymore. Mistakes are entirely mine. Probably the last fic in this series (but I doubt it's my last Steve/Bucky fic!)
> 
> Additionally: I know that grayscale is NOT how colorblindness works, and I consider Steve blue-yellow colorblind for the sake of this fic, even though red-green is much more common. But I reiterate: colorblindness does not actually work this way, and please consider this some kind of special colorblindness or whatever that only exists in the MCU for the sake of this fic.

The incredible thing, the undeniably overwhelming thing, is that when it’s all over, when the haze of trying to catch the man that killed Erskine subsides and the adrenaline boils out of Steve’s system, is that suddenly he notices _color._

It’s never been a thing before. He’s (was) colorblind and he lived his life that way; he wore glasses for his bad eyesight when he was drawing, because there was no wearing glasses on the street – they were expensive and when Steve calculated the number of fights he got into, it also wasn’t worth the risk – but still he could manage to draw, and that’s what mattered. He loved charcoal because there wasn’t any risk of strange color combinations, of losing the texture of everything when it came to color, and beyond that, he never thought much about it.

But suddenly, now, he can see every color and it shatters him, a little. He spend a full hour staring at the sunlight on the water just near the Brooklyn Bridge, trying to catch his breath even though now he doesn’t have to, wishing he knew how or had time or money for lessons to teach him how to capture those strains of green or blue or gold that he didn’t know existed. It’s a strange thing, to sit and stare and be captured by things like the blue swirl of a woman’s dress, the sweet grassy nature of a blue just saturated with enough green to make it pop. Mary Collins, bless her, didn’t recognize him and when he kept staring at the hemline of her dress, accented with a touch of bright, sunshine yellow, and she hit him with her purse. Mary Collins never took any nonsense from any man.

And it’s an odd thing to say, but the fact of the matter is that he gets used to it. He didn’t think he would but the USO Tour really makes bright color and flashy lights old real quick, and somehow the magic of it is gone before he really knows what happened. All that’s left is the occasional flash of sudden amazement at things he never noticed before – the exact shade of Peggy’s lipstick, when he meets up with her again in Italy (although that might be his preoccupation with her lips), for instance. The patina of grayscale no longer covers his vision.

When he saves Bucky, when Bucky calms down enough to sit back with Steve for more than a second, the shock of the color of his eyes makes Steve almost take a step back. He always knew they were clear, but he never really knew how blue they could be when he was smiling, or how they transformed into a crystalline grey when he was upset. “You have to stop looking at me that way,” Bucky says, over and over, particularly today. “Someone’s gonna take you out if you don’t start paying attention.” 

“I’m still getting used to how short you are,” Steve quips in return, and Gabe laughs in the background somewhere, and Bucky punches Steve in the arm, hard. Steve grins in return. “You’re practically pocket-sized.”

“Shove me in your pocket, Rogers, see how that works out for you,” Bucky snaps back, but he’s grinning. 

Jim is the smartass who remarks, “At least it would be warm in there. It’s fucking freezing out here.” 

The rest of the commandos agree, mutteringly, except for Dugan who has never muttered a single word in his entire life. They settle in for the night and Steve spends his watch staring at the blue tones of the snow and trying to recapture some of the magic of those first few days of being able to see color in every vibrant tone, but he can’t quite seem to manage it.

~~~~~

Steve knows that Sam suspects that Steve sits in the Smithsonian exhibit on Captain America ( _now permanent!_ a cheery sign announces, because it has been so overwhelmingly popular, even after he destroyed the Triskelion, or maybe because) to try and capture the fleeting memory of his past self. That the dark theater where they play that short movie (produced by Stark Industries!) is a link that he wallows in.

And maybe Sam is right. There is an awful lot of depression happening in Steve’s life, and he is finally strong enough to admit it. But dealing with all his friends from the war losing their memory, repetitively, is more exhausting than walking pneumonia, and Steve is an expert on that particular topic.

But really what he goes for is the forty seconds of Bucky laughing in pure black and white. Sure he’s wearing his dogtags so it’s clearly the war – and there’s Steve at his side, large and _Captain America_ , but what’s most striking is that if Steve just imagines some of the color back – not all of it, no, but some of the muted colors, the ones that he remembers seeing most clearly, he can make out Bucky in 1939, laughing at some stupid joke, smiling like sunshine. 

This would all be so much worse, though, if he hadn’t been sitting there like a lump and suddenly, next to him, there was Bucky, watching the screen with a mesmerized look on his face, like the shape that the man on the screen was taking was utterly and completely alien. Steve goes very still, then, and looks around the room. There are still some people in the theater – a pair of teenagers holding hands, the girl curling tightly around the boy, the boy holding her like she’s something precious – an elderly couple wearing sensible shoes and a family with three small, squirming children, although they come and leave quickly when they realize that the youngest child cannot stop yelling, “ _Cap’ain ‘Merica!_ ” in an excited frenzy.

Bucky sits quietly and watches the entire thirty minutes, and at the end, when it starts to boot up again, he looks at his hands and then tips his head over, looks Steve in the eye. Even in the dark, the serum grants Steve the ability to see the utter clarity of blue that Bucky’s eyes have taken. 

It’s clarity that still rips his breath away, leaves him struggling to find where the oxygen in the room went.

They just look at each other for a long moment. Steve is afraid that if he says something, that Bucky will leave, or vanish, like maybe this is actually a hallucination. He looks a little worse for wear; scruffy a bit, but still like he’s been eating, so that’s good. “I made sure you were breathing,” he finally says, as the voice on the screen starts up about, “and there go our boys, off to fight Nazis!” in that 1940s announcer style that Steve finds so reassuring. “I made sure,” he says again, closing his hands into fists.

“I know, Buck,” he says, and there’s a deep stab of guilt, right into the pit of his stomach. Bucky dove in after him, just like that, without a thought, but Steve didn’t go after Bucky when he should have, when he should have scaled that mountain and _found_ him. Maybe then things would be different. 

People think that Steve is a good man, and maybe he is, but Bucky’s always been the better one.

Bucky stands, then, shakes his head. “Please don’t stop looking for me,” he says, and the way he says it makes Steve’s heart break. There is so much there that is plaintive, and Steve understands, he can’t just come and ask for help, he can’t just show up wanting to found. It’s not possible for him to want it, not yet. But he can ask for that.

“I’m sorry I didn’t go looking sooner,” Steve says, and he means it. “If I had known, I would have ripped the world apart to come get you.” 

Bucky looks down and his eyes are a cloudy, piercing blue, and then he looks away, then he walks away, as if Steve said the entirely wrong thing. Steve lets him, gives him a few minutes, before he goes after him. He doesn’t find him, but that’s no surprise at all.

Sam is surprised that Steve just let him go, but Steve shakes his head when Sam points out that they’ve only been looking for him for months. “He still needs time,” he says simply, as if that explains everything. It’s clear that Bucky isn’t killing anyone, or they would have heard about it. What Bucky needs is to know that Steve is coming this time.

That he’s coming after him, not self-destructing over it.

“Are you sure you didn’t just imagine him?” Sam asks, finally, gently. It’s not unheard of, he explains. “PTSD does funny things to people. Are you sure-“

“I’m sure,” Steve says, trying not to show how pleased he is that Sam is worried. It’s a rare thing. 

~~~~~  
She is a tiny slip of a thing, in one way, barely topping five feet, but in another she’s sturdy, curvy – Steve doesn’t like to call a lady _fat_ , but she says it of herself, not disparagingly but with a level of matter-of-factness, like the more she makes people confront it, the more comfortable she is with it, and her skin is the same color as Gabe Jones’. It makes Steve smile a little. Her name is Ellen Rosemont, and she called him on an unbearably sunny day to meet him in a quiet office outside of the National Archives. It’s chilly enough inside that she’s wearing a cardigan and a casual cotton scarf colored with bluebirds the exact shade of the sky.

She is, she tells him, an archivist with NARA – and then she pauses. “That’s the National Archives and Records Administration,” she adds, “I processed your collection,” she keeps going, and Steve isn’t sure what that means, so he tells her. 

She blushes a bit then, and laughs. “Oh, sorry,” she says. “So about twenty years ago, Howard Stark dumped his entire collection of personal papers – letters and diaries and stuff – that predated 1960 on NARA. We took it because it was historically valuable, but it got sort of lost in the backlog due to money and a really airtight restriction that didn’t allow us to make the papers available until about four years ago, when Pepper Potts donated a huge endowment for us to process the papers and make them available to the public.” 

Steve nods at that. “All right,” he says, “but that doesn’t explain why you asked me to come here.”

She smiles at that. “Well, it turned out that Howie – er, Mr. Stark,” she clarifies, with a blush, and Steve wonders how much of Howard’s personal life has passed through the hands of this woman, “had a huge collection of letters that were found, posthumously, that he sort of just stacked up in between notes and schematics for a really silly looking floating refrigerator. All this correspondence didn’t actually belong to Howard – it belonged to you.”

Steve suddenly feels a prickle of cold on the back of his neck. What letters could have possibly fallen into the hands of Howard Stark that belonged to him? The woman continues, and finally lifts the boxes from the floor. They’re slate gray, and not very big, but there are two of them. “They were still sealed,” she finally admits, “and I’m the one who unsealed them. I haven’t shown them to anyone – my boss thinks I’ve gone totally kooky with my description, but I thought, considering…” she pauses. “I think you should decide if you want anyone to look at them, first.”

Steve stares at the boxes, like maybe they contain live ammunition and not something as benign as letters. She opens them and he sees that everything has been neatly sorted into folders, pressed out carefully. “Should I be wearing gloves?” he asks, although he doesn’t know anything about how to handle old paper.

She smiles softly and shakes her head. “You’ll do more damage with them on, than off,” she explains, and just pushes a box towards him. “But you would be doing me a huge favor if you just look at one folder at a time and keep everything in the order you found it.”

He looks over at her and nods, and she stands up. “I have some work to do, but if you need me, just knock on the door, and I’ll come by,” she says, in a way that Steve knows means _I respect your privacy,_ and it makes him like her even more.

At first, before he opens the folder, he thinks maybe they’re letters from Peggy, soppy and redacted love letters, but no. Instead, what he finds inside is like a bomb directly to the core of him.

They’re from Bucky.

They’re beautiful, elegant letters, letters that Steve didn’t know Bucky was capable of writing. Letters that disarm him at every turn, letters that are angry odes to what feels like a ceaseless war at the same time that they’re love letters, pressing into the space between Steve’s heart and Steve’s ribs. They’re the kind of letters that Steve wished he would get but didn’t think that would ever come, because he only got the guts up to kiss Bucky after rescuing him. 

But Bucky wrote them anyway, stupidly, or maybe bravely, without taking the care to call Steve by some woman’s name, without restraint. 

Steve lingers along passages, where he can hear Bucky’s voice in his head best, his hands gentle, aware the entire time that this isn’t just Ms. Rosemont’s livelihood but also that seventy years ago this was a link between them. _Every day it gets colder I think of Brooklyn. I think of your stupid mug and I hate it, but I hope it’s cold there too, because at least then I could feel like something touching me was touching you, too. Of course, if it’s cold there, I hope you’re wrapped up in every sweater we own. If it’s cold there I hope you’re missing how I feel around you, I’m not sorry to say. I want you to miss me. I want you to miss me so much that the next time you see me, you can’t help but be okay if I tell you that all I want to do is kiss you on the mouth, over and over._

Another letter, later, is desperate. Steve can almost feel the desperation in it. _I hate the mud we slog through. It doesn’t even matter where we are, I hate it. I hate that you would just look at me with that stupid patient look you get on your face and say something dumb like ‘this is for America’ and I would have to resist pushing you into the mud and digging you in until you laughed so hard you would make me laugh, because that’s such crap, ‘this is for America’ but it’s the exact crap you would say if you wanted to make me smile and you know it. I want to go home. I want to slog through American mud. I would slog through miles and miles of American mud if it meant doing it with you._

Worse, one that makes Steve blush, as much for the content and because he knows that Ms. Rosemont read it and carefully cataloged it. _The worst part of this is that I can’t even rub one out. I can’t close my eyes and think of the shape of your mouth when you chew on the end of a pencil and imagine the way your color up when you get out of a hot shower, the towel wrapped around your hips. Instead of being able to close the door and close my eyes and think of you, I’m trapped between two lunkheads yapping away about their sweethearts back home. Nothing kills passion quicker than the lack of poetry. Not that I’m one to talk. Don’t fall in love with anyone while I’m gone, all right? I have every intention of doing every filthy thing that comes into my head to you when I get back, if you give me even the slightest hint you wouldn’t try and break my nose for it._

There’s only one filthy letter, though, so Steve figures he must have been desperate at that point.

 _I want you to know_ reads the last one that Steve can manage to read, near the end, before he puts the folder back and closes the boxes and tries to remember how to even focus his eyes, _that while you’re the best man I’ve ever had the honor of knowing, more important than that, more important than your goodness and your dedication and you stubborn set of morals, is that I love you. I’ve loved you like a secret our whole lives long. You can’t hate me for this. I’ve loved you longest and I’ve loved you best, and the only thing I’m sorry over is that I didn’t have the guts to tell you._

Steve knocks at the door, and Ms. Rosemont opens the door. “Can I-“ he begins, and knows she will have to say no, these letters don’t belong to him, but he has to ask because he wants to take them home and linger over them, and hide them under his bed. 

But before he even finishes asking, she takes the boxes, businesslike, and puts them in sturdy shopping bags, and presses them into Steve’s hands. He knows she could get fired for this, but she just says, “I’m formally deaccessioning these. They don’t have anything to do with Howard Stark’s papers.”

He knows that’s not why she did that, that there is a part of her that understands, and he thinks that her job must be very hard sometimes, to see the inside of people’s hearts and to have to expose it to the world. He feels awkward for a moment, but then he hugs her, the bags still in his hands, and she hugs him back.

~~~~~  
It’s late, and Steve is almost asleep when he feels the breeze of an open window. He doesn’t sit up in bed. He listens, carefully, and he can hear Sam sleeping, his breath even, in the other room of the apartment, but that’s it.

Still, he knows.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come after you,” he says, into the darkness. His eyesight can still make out the glint of metal, the sleek silver color of it. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t good enough to do that.”

All that he hears back is silence, so he figures he should keep going. “Sometimes I remember how blue everything was that day, and I hate it, I hate the color, but then I remember that when you used to smile your eyes would turn that same exact color and I can’t, I can’t hate it anymore.”

“That’s sappy,” Bucky’s voice says, finally, and Steve thinks that maybe it is his best friend, and not the broken remnants of a weapon. 

Steve doesn’t laugh but he does smile at that. “Yeah, probably,” he says finally. 

There’s silence again, and then Bucky says, “I should go.”

But Steve, at long last, feels it. It’s been hunting for him, it’s been searching for him, an extension of who he is, and he’s done it as much for himself as for Bucky, as for _please don’t stop looking for me_ , and Steve finally realizes what that means. It’s not about keeping the physical search going. So he says, softly, “I’ve loved you like a secret our whole lives long. I’ve loved you longest and I’ve loved you best-“

“-and only thing I’m sorry over is that I didn’t have the guts to tell you,” Bucky finishes, and suddenly Bucky is there, in Steve’s bed, his mouth pressed over Steve’s mouth, metal hand against the side of his face.

The colors are bright against the inside of his eyelids, and it’s like the first time he could see color all over again.

**Author's Note:**

> I DO NOT ENDORSE STEALING ARCHIVAL MATERIAL FROM NARA.


End file.
